With two weeks at a stretch half way September 2021 the junior developers did get a good introduction to Dynamics 635 Business Central as an application and as a development platform. After 3 weeks at the job, partly working on their homework assignment and daily task, they returned to Hotel Mooi Veluwe in Putten, NL, inside the woods of the Veluwe, on Monday 18th of October with their trainer Luc van Vugt for a first deep-dive into Solution Development.

technical track

After the students were welcomed and before they started their deep-dive into solution development, Luc discussed in general terms his review of the two research assignments given to them at the end of the 2nd course week: (1) Your company and the methodologies it uses and (2) You as a developer. Where the explicit goal was to investigate these topics and as such get to learn more about their company and their role, the implicit goal was the requirements set for these assignments. It was interesting to see how this was easier to comply with for the one than for the other.

solution development

Having been introduced to Business Central as an application and a development platform it was time to show the students how these two come together in their daily work: Solution Development, adding new features to and integrating with an existing application. How to do that applying the best practice was what was worked on in this 3rd course week. They learned about the various design and coding patterns and naming conventions. In addition various other best practices like the use of Azure DevOps (ADO) planning engine and source code management.

Geared with a step-by-step detailed business case called Seminar Registration the students where guided through the shared model behind various standard Business Central modules: from configuration tables and pages, through operational transaction to historical transaction tables and pages, and implemented the standard posting process. Code and work progress was to be uploaded and registered in ADO.

All newly introduced concepts and techniques were challenged by means of a daily quiz triggering a lot of sidetrack topics.

The program to get the Seminar Registration completed on Thursday turned out quite ambitious for half of the group – first time ever in the existence of this training. Therefore they continued to work on the case on Friday and as homework assignment before week 4. The other half picked up a new case called Support Registration applying all the learned concepts and techniques in a new context. Being a very ambitious project the assignment will continue in the weeks following our week 3. Both homework assignments have to be delivered before a mutually agreed upon deadline in Azure DevOps.

what’s next

Based upon the Seminar Registration case the technical track will tackle Reporting and Automated Testing in week 4a, starting on 15th of November, 2021.

Looking forward to our next course week.